Review/Film; Young Doctors Explore the Boundary Between Life and Death

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There is no innocence in the world of ''Flatliners'' - not in childhood memories, not in the motives of the medical students who push themselves beyond death and then return to life, not in the film's borrowings from classic horror movies. And all of that is to the good. ''Flatliners'' is a stylish, eerie psychological horror film laced with wit, a movie that thrives on its characters' guilty secrets and succeeds on the strength of the director Joel Schumacher's flair for just this sort of smart, unpretentious entertainment.

Like ''Flatliners,'' the best of Mr. Schumacher's previous films have been glossy ensemble pieces in which members of a young, improbably attractive gang are threatened by adulthood. They are college friends in the underrated ''St. Elmo's Fire'' and teen-aged vampires in ''The Lost Boys.'' Mr. Schumacher is at his worst dealing with fundamentally ordinary people in a film like ''Cousins.'' Fortunately, the characters in ''Flatliners'' have their peculiar death wish, and they prove that the most commonplace memories can turn sinister.

Kiefer Sutherland plays Nelson, the insanely ambitious student who plans the death experiment. Drugs will send him into a state in which he is technically dead, his heart and brain producing flat lines on the monitoring machines. Then his colleagues will revive him.

Julia Roberts is the sensitive student who has private reasons for studying the afterlife, and Kevin Bacon the valiant one who is suspended after performing surgery to save a life, without permission. William Baldwin plays a womanizer, and Oliver Platt is the skeptic, who knows that Nelson's greatest ambition is not to unlock death's mysteries but to be profiled afterward on ''60 Minutes.'' In the script, the first by Peter Filardi, these characters are neatly and flatly drawn. Mr. Sutherland and Mr. Bacon are especially effective in adding emotion to their roles. So is Ms. Roberts, though anyone who expects her to run away with this film as she did with ''Pretty Woman'' is mistaken.

The true star of ''Flatliners'' is the film's haunting atmosphere. Mr. Schumacher, who started his career in fashion design, knows the full value of style. Like all good horror films, this one exists at a skewed angle to reality. But more than most, its resonance depends on the meeting of ordinary life with a slick, hyperreal aura (which owes a great deal to Eugenio Zanetti's production design and Jan De Bont's photography).

The experiments take place in the murky bluish light of a makeshift lab where half-covered statues and one huge sculptured face are ominous observers. After his return from death, Mr. Sutherland walks down a street where steam from construction sites billows in the background, bright street lights create a shining foreground, and a bag lady in a dark alley warns, ''In the end, we all know what we've done.'' The foggy atmosphere and the omen evoke old horror films, just as the overreaching medical students are Frankenstein's descendents. A figure who echoes the red-hooded dwarf in Nicolas Roeg's ''Don't Look Now'' becomes the wittiest and most frightening creature in ''Flatliners.'' But Mr. Schumacher never lets these savvy allusions degenerate into camp, and his pacing keeps him a step ahead of the audience.

When Mr. Sutherland experiences death, he at first recalls green fields and romping children, an image that seems much too idyllic. This man's near-death memories would be much kinkier. Sure enough, the picturesque scene turns out to be less wholesome than it appears.

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No one in the audience will be in suspense when Nelson's colleagues have trouble reviving him. It is far too early in the film for Mr. Sutherland to disappear, and ''Flatliners'' doesn't turn its stars into ghosts. But as the others experience death, each for a longer period of time and later into the film, the odds of losing a character increase dramatically.

And, in the film's most chilling idea, each person carries back from the other side some dark, unresolved burden of guilt that takes human form, at least on screen. Mr. Filardi's script is best when defining the characters' guilty pasts, which raise questions about sin, responsibility and unintended evil. The weakest writing involves Mr. Baldwin's character, who didn't have to die in order for the women he deluded to start haunting him; that probably would have happened in life. And Mr. Platt's character is so blatantly functional, as comic relief and cynic, that the story's mechanics show through.

But when taken on its own stylish terms, ''Flatliners'' is greatly entertaining. Viewers are likely to go along with this film instantly or else ridicule it to death. Its atmospheric approach doesn't admit much middle ground.

Flatliners

Directed by Joel Schumacher; written by Peter Filardi; director of photography, Jan De Bont; edited by Robert Brown; music by James Newton Howard; production designer, Eugenio Zanetti; produced by Michael Douglas and Rick Bieber; released by Columbia Pictures. Running time: 111 minutes. This film is rated R.

Nelson....Kiefer Sutherland

Rachel....Julia Roberts

Labraccio....Kevin Bacon

Joe....William Baldwin

Steckle....Oliver Platt

A version of this review appears in print on August 10, 1990, on Page C00006 of the National edition with the headline: Review/Film; Young Doctors Explore the Boundary Between Life and Death. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe